The BYU Biology Department’s efforts to lionize Darwin and find meaningful parallels between his life and those of great men have me wondering.Perhaps the BYU Darwin Bicentennial celebrations attempted to make a Darwinian mole hill into a Darwinian mountain.Of course Darwin did a great job at uncovering a mechanism driving microevolutionary processes (he did not “invent” evolution), but I am not inclined to put him into the same category as other great men. I would argue that in the grand scheme of things, his scientific accomplishments and their impact on society pale in comparison to those from scientists like Boyle, Newton, Galileo, Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell.

Let's take Galileo, for example. Not only was he a great scientist, his work is directly connected to the Restoration.

- Joseph Smith and Galileo encountered stiff resistance from apostate religionists when they tried to tell the world of truths they had discovered.Joseph Smith had truths about the nature of the godhead and religions, and Galileo had truths about the nature of our solar system and our place in the universe.

- Also, Galileo and Smith encountered the same sort of opposition as they challenged deep-seated apostate views. The prophet Joseph Smith declared, “I soon found that my telling the story had excited a great deal of prejudice against me among the professors of religion, and was the cause of great persecution.”And Galileo similarly wrote, “I discovered in the heavens many things that had not been seen before our own age. The novelty of these things, as well as some consequences which followed from them . . . stirred up against me no small number of professors.”

- And attempts were made to disprove each man’s discoveries.In the case of Smith, clergy members attempted to deny and disprove it by claiming that “there were no such things as visions or revelations in these days; that all such things had ceased with the apostles and that there would never be any more of them.”And in the case of Galileo, “[Theologians] sought to deny and disprove the new things which, if they had cared to look for themselves, their own senses would have demonstrated to them.”

The only thing that I can see which prevents you from replacing "Galileo" with "Darwin" through out is that you simply do not believe Darwin's theory. Well, that and that Darwin was never imprisoned and lived too late to be a precursor to the Restoration.

Reply

Dave C.

2/20/2009 10:41:38 am

Jeff,

You are right that people who accept a theory praise its developer, while those who do not consider the developer a marginal influence at best.

I didn't see the lecture, but based on your report I think I would agree with you. Rather than a comparison of lives, per se, I think it's interesting to consider chronological parallels. It's easy to think of history as a bunch of independent stories, forgetting that some of them were happening at the same time.

Speaking of meaningful comparisons, your lauding of Galileo is interesting. As I've pointed out previously (http://ldsscience.blogspot.com/2008/11/galileo-then-and-now.html), the arguments of the Catholic Church at the time are very similar to those that occur in our Church today. A cardinal of Galileo's time made the following points:

-Its fine to talk of heliocentrism as a theory, but not as a fact.

-To say it is a fact goes against the plain meaning of the scriptures.

-The Church cannot encourage an interpretation that runs counter to those of Church authorities.

-Passages that say that the sun goes around the earth are just as inspired as those that are about other important doctrines revealed by the Holy Ghost, such as the virgin birth.

-Heliocentrism might make more sense given the data at hand, but it has not been proved, and in the absence of proof we may not depart from the holy scriptures.

-One might say that the prophets were speaking from their own limited perspective, but they got their knowledge from God, and were therefore not likely to be wrong.

-Simple observation shows that the sun goes around the earth.

My point is not about good guys vs bad guys or right vs wrong. It is that human nature endures, and we are not that different from them.

What you don't seem to recognize is that the entire biological scientific establishment accept Darwin's theories as scientific law, and therefore lionize him.

If you don't think making his case was much of an accomplishment, consider the culture war he ignited, which is still burning to this day, even right here on this very blog. If his conception of truth as he observed and induced is that upsetting now, it was a hundred times moreso in his day.

Do you think he wasn't vilified, hated, or persecuted. Like Joseph Smith, he preached what was widely considered heretical, out of a deep conviction of standing up for what he knew through his careful study to be true. Trust me, he was vilified plenty, and his name gets dragged through the mud regularly today with guilt by association ploys like your previous post on Marx and Stalin.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I will recognize that he was afraid for his life, his marriage, and wanted to stay friends with his naturalist priestly mentors so he sat on the Origin of Species for seventeen years until he was about to get scooped, but like most revolutionary breakthroughs it still was a powerfully frightening thing to do, yet he had the fortitude to go through with it.

That is the meaningful comparison. Like you say, the Biology department recognizes the courage it took because they accept the theory. It takes a little imagination to see it from the other side. However, if you were advertising the views of this blog at Berkeley instead of BYU, I like to think I might recognize your courage, even if I thought it woefully misguided.

Reply

Dave C.

2/20/2009 02:06:32 pm

(Please note that I have changed the post so that its arguments are not so much directed toward the presenter. My intent is to focus on the content of the presentation).

Jared, I think those points came from Cardinal Bellarmine. I agree that the arguments from the Catholic Church are very similar to those we find in the Mormon community today. An essential difference, however, would be that the Catholic leadership exercised its political and judicial power to silence Galileo and lock him up. As far as I can tell, the LDS faith has not gone so far as to take away someone's freedom for supporting supposed heretical scientific theories.

Reply

Dave C.

2/20/2009 02:19:45 pm

"What you don't seem to recognize is that the entire biological scientific establishment accept Darwin's theories as scientific law, and therefore lionize him."

--After going to the meeting at BYU and communicating with Steve Peck, I am well aware of this. Although there are a number of natural scientists who are dissatisfied with neo-darwinism (www.dissentfromdarwin.org)

Yes! The fact that Darwin was vilified like Joseph Smith was mentioned - that is something I forgot about, probably because I don't see it as a noteworthy comparison (it's not something that make me look at him any differently).

If he had not intentionally left God out of his theory - something which was iconoclastic back then - then perhaps he would not have met so much resistence.

Darwin: "I would give nothing for the theory of natural selection if it required miraculous additions at any one stage of dissent." Thems were fightn' words back then.

Fighting words because of a narrow view of miracles meaning going against laws of nature, a view that I have always been under the impression that Mormonism doesn't share. Darwin was trying to understand a law of nature and refused to be swayed from that goal by those who would proclaim these things unexplainable and settled by holy writ.

This is the essence of the heroic Galileo figure. It is the insistence that there are only two extremes in this repeating drama, science vs. religion, that has the culture of both disciplines all contorted and screwed up today more than ever.

You are quite correct that Darwin did NOT invent evolution. Evolution is simply a fact of nature that needed a scientific explanation. Darwin was the first to propose a scientifically valid explanation that could drive evolution.

Your list of historically important scientists, of which you segregate from Darwin, are all physical scientists. Darwin was a life scientist.

Darwin's many ideas, published in many different books, literally transformed life science, and his theory of natural selection became the grand synthetic principle. You may not want to lionize him. Fine. But, those who wish to ignore Darwin too often seem to have pre-existing theological reasons for doing so. To the rest of us, evolution is as obvious as the round earth.

I find it depressing that so many smart theologians seem to reject the possibility that "God's handiwork" can be revealed to us through our empirical observations of changes in fossils, changes in DNA, and the obviously prolonged age of this earth. Such data, in some sense, reveal God. As Einstein said, "I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details."

On the evolution thing - "... on the one hand, we have the atheistic scientists with their theories because they managed to find the fossils, and they sat and talked to the bones face-to-bones, and they managed to guess what the bones purportedly were telling them... On the other hand, we have the prophets with their testimonies because they managed to find God, and they walked and talked with God face-to-face, and they were shown visions of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants, and were even shown visions of the creation of worlds without number... " ( http://www.kinematicrelativity.com/article_006.php )

I am interested in that quote on Einstein - "I want to know God's thoughts... the rest are details." Did Einstein ever profess belief in an anthrophomorphic personal God? Or is this again his reference to nature as God according to his professed religion which he calls the "cosmic religious feeling"?

In his "The World as I See It" Einstein stated "I cannot conceive of a God who rewards and punishes his creatures, or has a will of the type of which we are conscious in ourselves."

Einstein also stated with clear allusion to the Messiah, "An individual who should survive his physical death is also beyond my comprehension, nor do I wish it otherwise."

I feel certain that Einstein was an atheist. Do we have any record that he professed otherwise?

Reply

Dave C.

3/4/2009 08:03:13 am

Castel,

In the best selling biography "Einstein: His Life an Universe", Isaacson argues that Einy was somewhat of a deist - beleived in an impersonal God, but a believer nonetheless.

Of course, everyone is a believer. Even the devils believe. The big difference is simply that the devils 'defy' and lead others away from the personal God who is the Deo/Theo to all of us. The devils have no 'feelings' for God our Father; they are all past-feeling, all a-moral and therefore a-theists.

I'm not saying Einstein is a devil. I am in no position to judge. I just don't want to defend the idea that he propones regarding an impersonal god.